Monday, September 24, 2012

Teaching the World To Die: Unitarian Universalist Death Ways

For
the last few summers, I’ve worked on a series of discrete projects with an eye
to independent publication

in 2010, I journaled an extended meditation on
the Book of Ecclesiastes, a reflective journey into an ancient wisdom tradition
that I independently published as Wisdom
for the Ages;

in 2011, I collected and edited my poetic
meditations, sermons, and other writings around the extended Holidays and independently
published the collection If Only for the
Season;

and this summer, I wrote an historical
and opinion essay on UU attitudes about death, some 8,000 words, for
publication as a Kindle edition I called “Teaching the World to Die.”

Before
settling on the UU ministry, I’d studied and planned to be an historian,
perhaps teaching and researching in the academy. My area of interest was ante-bellum U.S.
history, specifically popular intellectual history—the sort of trends and
interests of the hoi polloi. For
example, I studied the enthusiastic religions that followed the westward
progress of the Erie Canal from the great revivals of Charles Finney, through
the rise of Mormonism and other home grown religions, through the phenomenon of
Spiritualism on the brink of the Civil War. In graduate school, 1969-70, at Vermont during
the Vietnam War and Kent State, I became interested in the roots of the American
Peace Movement, discovering that the first American Peace Society was formed in William Ellery Channing’s study. That introduction to Unitarianism changed the
trajectory of my life.

I’m
still an historian at heart, with the gathering of information and its ordering
into a narrative my essential approach, the narrative having a purpose and always
open to reinterpretation. I love
history, yet maintain that any history is only one version of many
possibilities.

History
isn’t one story, but many stories.

The
story I tell in “Teaching the World to Die” is about how we historic Unitarians
and now contemporary Unitarian Universalists have greatly influenced American death
ways. I’m a player in this history. Over the course of two centuries our
tradition has humanized and domesticated death, resisting supernaturalism and
its traditions, lifting up what is naturally transcendent and sacred about a
human life. It’s a grand story set in what,
for many is still a morbid context.

The Rural Cemetery Movement

It
begins in the 1830s around Boston, already the Athens of American and home to
the Enlightenment religion freedom, reason, and tolerance known as
Unitarianism. There was a reform
movement led by Unitarians that sought to take death out of the pallor of the
church’s graveyard into the countryside and beneficences of Nature. The movement had sanitary or health considerations,
and cities, including Boston, were running out of burial space. These Unitarian reformers looked to a
classical ideal known as a cemetery
(place of repose) in the countryside resulted in a cultural phenomenon in
Cambridge known as Mt. Auburn, the first carefully landscaped rural or garden
cemetery, a place for the living and for the dead in the context of Nature. This picturesque place became a bona fide
tourist attraction, the equal of sublime Niagara Falls. Soon similar suburban
cemeteries became a national standard.

Cremation

Next,
in the 1870’s, a radical Unitarian minister in NYC Octavius Frothingham preached the first sermon
advocating cremation, an option made possible by the recent technology of the
crematorium brought to the US from Europe.
Frothingham’s arguments were really thinly veiled remonstrances against
supernatural religions and the superstations they promoted.

Cremation
was slow to catch on, particularly in the face of an aggressive funeral
industry grounded in embalming—one of the legacies of the Civil War, including
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
His embalmed body took a slow journey from Washington to Springfield and
was viewed along the route.

Memorial Society Movement

After
World War II, an emergent Memorial Society Movement, in the name of the people,
resisted the practices of the firmly entrenched funeral industry. Cremation, somewhat dormant, then offered an
alternative to an immediate and often costly funeral. With cremation a memorial service at a later
date was possible. Many Unitarian
congregations led the way in establishing local memorial societies. In fact, the San Francisco Memorial society
was organized in a Unitarian minister’s living room, attended by a small group
that included Jessica Mitford’s attorney husband. Ms. Mitford soon wrote one of the most
influential books of the twentieth century, The American Way of Death that
challenged the funeral industry’s practices and launched a larger consumer movement.

Celebrations of Life

Unitarian
clergy also led the way in creating a new sort of final rite of passage, not a
mournful funeral, rather a memorial service (often) that acquired the name of
“Celebration of Life.” My twentieth
century colleagues became accomplished and renowned for speaking to the
deceased life in a thorough, loving, and honest fashion.

I
built on this tradition when in the early 1990s I published my innovative
collection of memorial service templates in a Skinner House Book: In Memoriam: Modern Funeral and Memorial
Services reissued in a 2000 second edition, now with an eye to a future
third edition. As I’ve mentioned before,
In Memoriam is a best-seller and now
considered a classic.

Through
these four innovations led and supported by our forebears, the rural cemetery
movement, cremation, the memorial society movement, and artful celebrations of
life as a person’s final passage, I make a persuasive case for how our
tradition has taught the world to die, not to shrink from death but to put it
in a natural and human scheme.

This
morning I can only sketch this little history.
I recommend that you take the time to read the essay that is available
on Amazon as a Kindle. Incidentally, you
don’t need a Kindle device. You can
download a Kindle reader to your computer, easily, quickly, and without
cost. The cost of the essay is a modest
ninety-nine cents.

I
am proud to have personally played an important part in this ongoing reform
movement. Death is at the heart of human
meaning, and religions seek to offer meaning. How we face death as a liberal
religious tradition is one of our sterling marks.

After
we sing our second hymn, I’ll sketch our UU outlook about the keystone to
Life’s meaning.

Death and Dying Among Contemporary Unitarian
Universalists

Unitarians
had an abiding interest in reforming American death ways. They significantly
influenced, intellectually and practically, how the greater culture deals with
the overarching reality of the human condition: mortality and death. Unitarian
innovations and reforms cited in this essay served to domesticate death in the
name of the universal human condition; challenged traditions and the
supernaturalisms that supported those traditions; resisted the
commercialization of death by a funeral industry; and lifted up the dignity and
worth of the deceased through artful and meaningful “celebrations of life.”

There
is a palpable Unitarian Universalist way for meeting death, though that way is
not prescribed. Remember, Unitarian Universalism is non-creedal, as well as
progressive. Its ethos has continually encouraged the proving of all things
while holding on to that which is good. This search for truth has been tempered,
humanized, by love. To seek the truth in love is an enduring mantra. That
notion of love has many dimensions, ranging from love of self and others like
one’s self to a love of Life and its often-inscrutable ways.

Death
should not be invisible. Death is a hard reality both to accept
within one’s own mortality and to experience through a beloved. The American
culture has devised strategies of denial. Yet death is a pathway to living
fully, even joyfully, in the moment. The ancient philosophers, the Stoics in
particular, counseled memento mori to
be regularly reminded that living is dying, not obsessively, but now and again
to give living context and perspective.

Think
of Unitarian Universalist ways in terms of the domestication of death, coming to a certain intimacy with death
through a variety of attitudes, behaviors, and strategies: memento mori, including contemplation of mortality in a garden
cemetery or similar setting, not sequestering the aged or dying, leaving the
body in a natural (unembalmed) state, tangibly commemorating the deceased, and
through subsequent years remembering.

Death
should be conditioned by Nature.
This might be literal, that is, interring the body, or cremation remains
in a garden cemetery or similar natural setting. Cremation allows many options,
including scattering at a meaningful site or several sites. Unitarian
Universalist churches may have a carefully designed cremation garden or more
informally include the ashes in a planting, the tree or shrub serving as a living
memorial. Furthermore, death should be
construed as part and parcel of Nature’s cycles of Life continuing through the
generations—a natural phenomenon. Being natural, death is right and fitting
in Nature’s scheme. Nature inspires a richer living through acceptance of
mortality’s place in the Web of Life.

Death
of a loved one, friend, or member of a community should be observed in an
artfully crafted funeral or memorial service. In this service, a formal
eulogy or a series of individual remembrances speak with loving truth of the
life that the deceased chose to live, the influences that played on her or him
through the years, how she or he shaped our common world, and what of that
person endures in us. With a dignified service and the promise to remember, the
deceased have has a blessed assurance that in death and repose there might be a
peace said to pass understanding.

Unitarian
Universalist ministers should be, and generally are, well prepared to plan and
conduct funeral and memorial services, entrusted by their congregations and a
larger community to navigate the complexities of end of life concerns and
rituals. This includes grief-counseling skills. A Unitarian Universalist
minister seeks to express transcendent
meanings, such as the continuing influence of love that the deceased
brought into the world—a love that endures and is passed on through the
generations.

The
funeral and memorial service should address the varied grief that
the family and gathered community are experiencing. This includes a continuing
promise to remain steadfast for those who grieve, acknowledging that grief is
an extended process, unique to each person who grieves.

Death
should be planned for. This planning has certain aspects.
Every individual should leave instructions about final wishes. This includes
the practical and existential, what is often included in a Living Will,
regarding the parameters of medical procedures to take or not to take in one’s
final days. A Living Will often designates a trusted person to have Power of
Attorney for Health Care, charged to make ultimate decisions. Such a directive
often is accompanied by a designation of the same or other person to have a
fiscal Power of Attorney. Of course, a legally drawn will alleviates hindrances
and complications of the deceased’s estate. Valuable, too, are instructions
regarding final rites; this includes disposition of the body, burial or
scattering. Instructions might include memorialization, such as cemetery plot
and monument, but also designated charities for contributions in the deceased’s
memory. It is good to memorialize in
tangible forms; and for those who survive, it is good to visit memorials,
respecting and remembering. Also important are directives for the funeral or
memorial service: music, readings, participants, officiant, location, and the
like, again in consultation with family and clergy.

It
is good to do such planning in
conversation with family and perhaps clergy. This models how to confront
death, honestly and compassionately, letting genuine feeling have its full day.
Such planning has benefits when death comes with grief in its wake.

Such
planning addresses considerations around consumer
concerns regarding funeral providers. A valuable resource is the
not-for-profit Funeral Consumers Alliance
(FCA) successor to the memorial society movement’s national organization. The
FCA declares, “We are the only 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization dedicated to
protecting a consumer's right to choose a meaningful, dignified, affordable
funeral. We offer education and advocacy to consumers nationwide and are not
affiliated with the funeral industry.”The
FCA website has many valuable resources to inform and guide.

Typically,
after a house and car, a funeral is a person’s third greatest life expenditure.
End of life arrangements should not be undertaken during duress, when
circumstances are pressing and emotions are vulnerable to compliance
techniques. All involved should counsel together about desired arrangements
before death comes.

Hospice care, often at home,
has become an increasing choice for Unitarian Universalists. This fits earlier
considerations regarding the domestication of death.

An
emerging option among Unitarian Universalists is green burial, allowing the unembalmed body, often in a simple
shroud, to decompose naturally in a natural setting. This reflects scruples
about cremation’s effects on the environment, particularly the energy required
to fire the crematorium. Green burial also looks to the body’s constituent
parts leaching back into Nature. (In advocating for a rural cemetery in the
early nineteenth century, Unitarians cited a dramatic example of Nature’s
embrace of the body. When the body of Major John Andre was exhumed in 1821, his
skull was held and pierced by roots of a peach tree. For those advocates of the
taking death into the countryside, this offered a romantic and compelling
example of “Nature’s embrace.”) Today, green burial resonates to the Unitarian
Universalist seventh principle: “respect for the interdependent web of existence
of which we are all a part.”

There
is no doubt that the first principle of Unitarian Universalism, “the inherent
worth and dignity of every person,” summarizes, as well informs this liberal
religion’s attitudes regarding its death ways. Through two centuries Unitarian
Universalists have increasingly emphasized the personal and universally human,
especially above traditional dogma and theology.

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New Kindle essay: Teaching the World to Die

UU Attitudes about Death

now a Kindle ebook

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101 Reasons I'm a UU

101, one-paragraph sketches offer Ed's and Jeff's personal approaches to Unitarian Universalism, while providing a sweeping perspective of two centuries and more of a living tradition both authors dearly love. They have crafted an accessible and entertaining collection. [see preview or buy atAmazon] New KINDLE edition.